Silent Devotion

The Many Lives of Edward Bear aka Winnie

If you spent your formative years watching Disney, it’s a good bet watching Winnie the Pooh was a significant part of it. Disney has made Winnie the Pooh into one of its most popular features, with many different direct-to-video featurettes, an animated television series as well as three feature length films. Children and adults alike have enjoyed such fare as The Tigger Movie, Piglet’s Big Move and Pooh’s Heffalump Movie, but you may not be aware of the rich history behind them, and the person responsible for it all.

Winnie the Pooh was the doing of British author A. A. Milne. Named after the stuffed teddy bear owned by his son, Christopher Robin Milne, Pooh?s actual name was Edward Bear. The first chapter of what would one day be the first book of Pooh was commissioned by the London’s Evening News for its December issue in 1925. At the time, Milne was already a prolific writer who had succeeded in creating several notable works. He was a playwright, a poet, and a novelist and his subsequent fame regarding the Pooh stories would always be a source of irritation to him.

The physical Pooh, owned by Christopher Robin Milne, was named after a bear named Winnipeg that lived at the London Zoo, and Pooh, a swan that they had encountered over the holidays. The first book that mentions Pooh, titled When We Were Very Young, explains that Pooh’s arms were so stiff that he could not use them to swat away flies; instead he needed to blow them away, resulting in the “pooh” sound and his subsequent nickname.

The Hundred Acre Wood that dominates the Winnie the Pooh books is most likely based on Ashdown Forest in East Sussex England. This was where Milne lived and his son grew up, and the name of the forest itself is much like that of the Five Hundred Acre Wood, which is close to Ashdown Forest.

The first Winnie the Pooh book was published in 1925 and was titled simply Winnie the Pooh. This initial story introduces many of the characters filmgoers are now familiar with, including the toy animals of Pooh, Piglet, and Eeyore, as well as the live animals of Owl and Rabbit. Latter in the tale, Kanga, a mother toy kangaroo and her baby Roo are introduced as well. While most of the stories are original, some had been previously published in the Evening News and some poetry works. Tigger would not be introduced until the second book, House at Pooh Corner.

There is a wealth of information to learn about Winnie the Pooh, and the animated features are just the tip of the ice berg. Take a look and see what other sources of Pooh lore you can learn!

Tips on How to Find the Best MP3 Player for You

If you do not own a MP3 Player you are probably wishing that you have one quite soon. Maybe you will be happy just listening to music on your new MP3 player or perhaps you would prefer to own a digital media player so that you can also view digital images and videos.

Whether you go for a digital media player or just an mp3 player, the choice will be made by the functionality that your require from your player. Those into keep fit or jogging will prefer something very small that can attached to their running or gym clothes and they will often buy an iPod Shuffle from Apple as it matches their requirements the best.

If you prefer to watch music videos instead of just listening to music tracks or if you are a film buff and want to watch movies on your mp3 player then you will need video replay functionality. This is now found on most mp3 players, including most of Apple’s iPod range, such as the iPod Classic, iPod Touch and more recently the iPod Nano.

An mp3 player, which can also display images and photographs, will be of great use to any level of photographer whether professional or amateur. When on location or later back home it is now very easy to transfer digital photos from a digital camera to a mp3 player that has the required functionality for photographic storage. This is a great way to back up photos as secure copies.

Make sure that you check out the sources of the different media that you want for you mp3 player before you make your final choice. Not all mp3 players will be able to access all sources and not all media types will be compatible. However you will not go wrong if you purchase an ipod as all media types are available direct from the iTunes store website.

You can also use some mp3 players as backup media for your personal computer, but the player you choose will have to have a high storage capacity to enable you to do this. A model like the Apple iPod Classic 80gb would be ideal for this. Make sure that the relevant software is available to help you undertake transfers of documents and files from your computer hard drive.

As with everything you get what you pay for, so if you need more functionality from your mp3 player it is going to cost you more to get it. There are many different manufacturers and models of mp3 players available and you should go online to do your research and to find the best deal. There you will find the biggest choice and detailed information on the most recent models.